Murder by Reflection (16 page)

Certainly his time was now full. Every night he went over to Marion Gayton's to get her appreciation of himself and his research. She was delighted to have some work she could do with him and kept devotedly at that he had given her. Every day he worked in his laboratory. His life was so full that it left no room for his mother. He no longer objected to being dressed as she liked, for he was dressing for someone else. But he had no time for the elder woman and she lost little time in resenting it.

That last long evening they had spent together had been a climax. It had given her a taste of what she had always hoped would happen and from that moment all that hope had retreated and faded. Ever since, he had either sat silently reading until she went to bed, or had actually left her and gone up to work in his laboratory until he heard her pass outside the door, going to her room. That evening her happiness and health, his power to please her and his capacity to tolerate her, all had been at the flood. He had thought, perhaps, that the relief at finding he could get around her wish to encircle him would be enough to keep him carelessly, kindlily tolerant of the captor, or captress, whom he had out-toiled. He had come to learn that no one can live just on relief, any more than we can be content for more than twenty minutes with the wonderful sense, when an abscessed tooth has been drawn, of just not-having-toothache.

The tide of their agreement was ebbing everywhere. She lowered; he sulked; the two of them, by a kind of reflection, set up a resonance. The simile which had so often been in his mind occurred violently again: “like the mouthpiece of a telephone put to the earpiece, building up an exasperating howl.” There had been many fluctuations in their queer friendship, this odd “commensalism,” each sharing the same table—the “mensa” of the lawyers but not the linked term, the “thorum”—but only really meeting at eyes' range.

“Well,” he thought, “she only wanted me as a thing to look at, a doll to dress.”

But though he had so thought and so resented, mutual self-interest—the balance in favor of keeping on—had always brought him back. The scales swung, but in the end there they were, once again swaying opposite one another.

Now, however, he was feeling that he had developed too many independencies, too many interests that, as in his science, he could not, and in his romance, he must not and would not, share with her. When the scales finally went off balance, as is the case when most balances have been too violently disturbed or misweighted—the fall-away was rapid. He found how much of his liking for her had been based on the fact that he liked being looked after, being admired, and having interests found for him. Now he had found a far more palatable admiration and also, at the same time, had an interest which was absorbing him, which she was too stupid to share and which her “rival” could understand and aid.

Beyond her money he had now no further need of her. When we have no need of people we have required but at our best have never loved, when we are still tied to them, then there can develop a dislike which to the onlooker, easy and free, seems in its intensity of detestation to be almost insane. Arnoldo was very sane in his way; his self-love was circumspectly rational and always asking itself if it had a sufficiency of reasons for its slightest exertion; but he rapidly began to experience this curious, almost nauseating, disgust.

Irene was certainly not a handsome woman, and time was, of course, doing nothing to improve her appearance, but neither was time doing anything out of the common course. She was aging, that was all. And to the natural lines of age were added the very human ones of age's usual concomitant, discontent and disappointment. Age and disappointment are not pretty but they may be appealing—but not to a man in Arnoldo's oblique position. To Arnoldo, she seemed to be becoming a species of ogress. She was now to him nothing short of repulsive. He could no longer bring himself to kiss her that formal good-night which had been their settled custom. She said nothing, and that did nothing to remedy the acute dislocation of their lives.

The colored servants, with their inborn histrionic sensitiveness to their “leads'” moods and play, hung around in a kind of listless expectancy as some animals await a thunderstorm, or as the Chorus in a Greek play nods its head at oncoming disaster. Joe was changed, letting fall his rendering of himself as the exuberant valet. He and Arnoldo almost entered into a tacit conspiracy to let everything slide and only keep up the minimum of appearances that Mrs. Heron required. It was a performance no longer “in the round” but only something rigged up to show to one lonely woman occupying the proprietor's box. Indeed, had he not wished to be in stylistic form every evening for Miss Gayton, he might have broken away completely from his wardrobe.

He found it a growing relief to be out of the house altogether. Had Kermit now called there would have been no fear that he might report not being visited. But, as he had in duty to Doc to see the young man when he called, he felt that he had no need to go down to the big house as well. The invitations were not pressing, and he had sent the colored photographs down by Arnoldo. They were good, but Mrs. Heron, who was naturally not getting easier to please, complained that they did not do justice to some of her color schemes.

“I am glad,” she remarked, “that those special photographs he took of me close to the mirror evidently failed. I am sure they would hardly have been happy.”

As usual, Arnoldo preserved silence. There is an offense against discipline in some armed forces called an impertinent silence. On that charge Arnoldo could have been “crimed” every day, and undoubtedly in Irene's mind he was.

Often he would bring back from Kermit's bundles of scientific journals. If she asked him to stay with her after dinner, when he had showed signs of going upstairs, changing, and shutting himself in his laboratory until she had retired, he would grunt an assent, fetch a sheaf of these periodicals, scatter them around his chair, and sit among the litter, reading and noting. It vexed her sense of propriety, the lovely room made to look like a paper-chase track. The incongruity of this modern untidiness obtruded painfully on her carefully constructed tableau.

She was watching him one evening, with the slow sense of exasperation which can only be built up between two people who know that they are unable to “talk things out”—who are long past that stage, and because of that are always conscious that everything the other does is done to affect them. It is nearly the most awkwardly self-conscious condition which human beings can achieve. Suddenly, however, she perceived that he was not affecting rumpled, slipshod indifference just to irritate her. For the first time, she could not remember in how many days or weeks, she was aware that he was not aware of her—he was roused, strongly interested to the point of forgetting for the moment where he was. She had only time to switch her eyes away, before, as she had just been ready enough to foresee, he raised his eyes above the page to see whether she had noticed that he had momentarily forgotten her. She had a book on her lap and pretended to read. After a few moments she could see that he was collecting the scattered papers. He put them neatly in a pile by the side of his chair. His shoe, which was half kicked off, he drew on with a finger. He was sitting up, no longer sprawling. He was going to be pleasant.

A moment before she would have been certain that there was nothing that she would have more welcomed. But as he swung toward geniality—as though they were the grotesque little man and woman in the toy barometer, joined together in a perpetual interdependent opposition—she felt herself swung back to resentment.

“Would you play something?” he asked.

It was a remarkable advance. She could not accept it.

“Why this evening, after so long?” she asked, with a certain dull sullenness that should have sent him out of the room. Instead, she was really surprised by his rising and coming toward her.

“Are you tired?” The tone expressed a real question, perhaps almost a concern.

“Yes,” she said defensively, yet warily. She would not yield anything, at least yet, but she would not break off negotiations. “Yes,” she said again, and waited. She was divided between the resentment that wanted to have a scene and the self-pity that longed to be soothed.

“I'm sorry; would you like me to read to you?”

“Yes,” she was able to concede. “Would you read me some poetry?”

He went over to the bookcase, picked out Elizabeth Browning's
Sonnets from the Portuguese,
drew up his chair, and began to read. It was too good to believe. True enough; she found incredulity rising like a fog and making the strong sentiment of the words take on a tinsel effect. The line of a poet as far unhappier in love as he was far greater in telling of it than the Portuguesing poetess, sounded harshly in her mind through Arnoldo's soft tones: “Cold Reason shall mock thee As the sun from a wintry sky.” While he was still in the middle of a sonnet she rose.

“I'm afraid I'm too tired to take in what you are reading.”

Her tone was certainly tired and cold. He shut the book with a snap of finality, rose also, put the book in its shelf and, without coming back to her, crossed the room and held open the door in silence. He followed her up the great staircase; he would not come abreast. Once she paused, hoping that he would, but he remained a step or two below. At the landing, as she turned toward her room, she heard him stop and say “Good-night.”

She would not turn back. She could see, dimly in the long mirror she was facing, his white-and-black figure in its evening clothes standing at the stair-head looking after her. “Good-night,” she said, looking at the reflection, and the echo, thrown from the glass surface, just reached his ears.

As her door closed, he went downstairs again. He collected the technical papers he had been reading, switched off the lights, and went up to his room. He changed quickly into his laboratory suit, picked up the papers again, and went to that room. For an hour or so he studied, making small notes and comparing readings he had tabulated in some record-books, smoking nervously as he worked. Then he tidied up everything and sat for some time gazing at the wall on which a number of radio setups were fixed. He did not, however, seem to be looking at them.

“Shall I?” he thought. “There's no accident. Perhaps it was meant I should run across that.”

His mind was in complete confusion. Why had he suddenly made an advance to her? Why? Because he had, a few moments before, caught sight of the possibility of escape, complete escape from her. And this, the hope of escape, had suddenly reduced his pressure of resentment and disgust. What he liked to call his captive rage was assuaged. It was an all-too-consistent reaction in him, consistent to his inconsistency. To him, living in a dream, the thought of being free was almost tantamount to the fact—with the additional advantage that in actual fact he had had to do nothing about it. So he made his advance to her, his friendly gesture of relief toward his companion because he had glanced a neat way of ridding himself of his proprietress.

He had divided the actual person into two, for she had for him no real existence of her own. She was for him two persons because she had two aspects in his life. And had the companion aspect responded properly, why, then he might have been content for the proprietress aspect to be “let off with a caution,” even if that caution were spoken only to himself. His nature would, probably, have been satisfied just to know that he had the whip hand and next time she misbehaved, next time she became wholly the proprietress, why, then she would have to go. But she had refused his offer of terms. She had shown that she considered herself the wronged party. It was then clear that he would have to submit even further if he were to be let live with the shadow of her disapproval lifted. The two sides of his will came together—the daylong-dreaming desire to be free and the required persistency of effort to effect his freedom. And immediately, as when binoculars are focused, he saw a single image, no longer two. Instead of an old-time companion with whom one side of him was familiar—an efficient housekeeper who alternated with an exasperating governess—now only one person remained constantly in his mind, a person who simply must be dismissed. And yet, even then, and wasn't that providential, it
could
all be accident, just a daydream, as far as he was concerned, but a daydream which nature
might
by accident—could he call it happy accident?—make actual.

After a considerable time he rose, remarking in hardly more than a whisper, “It can be put to the test. Nature can decide.”

Chapter XII

After that sub-acute storm the house seemed no worse, if no better. They seemed to have reached a new norm of tacitly agreed distance. She was certainly far from happy, pretty certainly her health was paying for her bitterness of mood, but it was apparently a resigned bitterness. He was certainly not genial, pretty certainly indifferent, but apparently content to carry on. The domestic staff accepted the atmosphere of this new act. The house ran quietly.

Arnoldo went out little. He was apparently absorbed in his work. His day was almost as regular as though he had had an office to attend. He would work from after breakfast; be called for lunch; return immediately after; be called in time to change for dinner. Once she remarked to him, in the, few exchanges they had, that she had been doing the month's house-bills and the bill for current was very high. Did he think the servants left the lights on all day in their quarters? He thought it was more likely his fault. If that was so, he did not think the consumption would be anything like so high next month.

He worked so hard that he even neglected Marian Gayton. He called on her only once, and then to recover the tube he had lent her. She showed him how she had kept the readings but he did not seem much interested. She was too intelligent to press him as to why he was abstracted. All he told her was that he wanted the tube for work he was now doing up at the house.